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Meritocracy or Social Exclusion?

Which is the greatest principle informing markets in further and higher/university education? Is it a consequence of the marketisation of education provision? Is it a consequence of market forces underpinned by class/elite struggles to reproduce/preserve their privileges?

All for ourselves, and nothing for other people, seems, in every age of the world, to have been the vile maxim of the masters of mankind.
Chapter IV, p. 448. - Adam Smith, Book 3, The Wealth of Nations

whether or not you credit psychoanalysis itself, the fact remains that we all must, to the greatest extent possible, understand one another's minds as our own; the very survival of humanity has always depended on it. - Open Culture

Which is the greatest principle informing markets in further and higher/university education? Is it a consequence of the marketisation of education provision? Is it a consequence of market forces underpinned by class/elite struggles to reproduce/preserve their privileges?

Meritocracy fails because of the inherent cognitive bias toward a just world hypothesis. The ones that succeed are overwhelmingly the ones who came from privilege and advantage, which allowed them to exploit their talents to the fullest. However, the mythology of meritocracy is that when one has privilege and advantage, clearly it is because he has done something to merit it. Sheer dumb luck does not factor into the equation at all.

Social exclusion seems a bit harsh, but I can see it as a way of describing the phenomenon as it exists. Those who merit acceptance into certain institutions of higher learning are in part the ones who can act in a way that those within the institution find acceptable. Necessarily, this means that there is a concurrently existing intention to exclude those who do act in that way.